Arbitrary PowerShell Expressions

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Today is the day that I will attempt to refocus my professional life and career. I’ve been on auto pilot for the last year or so. I’ve awoken to the realization that I am a strong believer in PowerShell and that it is the aspect (really automation in general) that I have the most enjoyment for at this point in my career.

The 2 1/2 years I was with my former employer, Highwinds (in the CDN operations group), was nothing if not an all-consuming blur. Managing thousands of Windows systems, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (and I mean 24×7!) was exhilarating, rewarding, and an unmitigated recipe for burn-out.

But thankfully I had my trusty PowerShell with me and I lived and died by it for those 2+ years. I came away with the absolute belief that in order to manage Windows systems on that scale you ABSOLUTELY have to have a tool like PowerShell. Microsoft got it right when that popped that one out. Thankfully they seem to be fully behind that technology now and into the future. I can clearly see those that are not willing to accept and or learn this new tool will not be able to manage their enterprises as their businesses grow as many will undoubtedly scale up to a level like Highwinds had. The “Cloud”; public, private, or whatever is at heart about scale and elasticity and if you can’t manage that you will be hurting if you keep doing it the old school way.

While I have become, I think, quite accomplished at PowerShell there are many aspects of PowerShell that I have not exposed myself too and many bad habits that I developed out of a “get it done” mentality on my part. I should have been developing PowerShell skills that were holistic and more adept at PowerShell in a PowerShell environment.

While I have been kind of “going through the motions”, albeit working hard, at my present job for a “Financial Services Company”. Who, should I identify that I work for in a “Social Media” environment I face disciplinary action to include termination, blah, blah, blah. Some days I feel like Goldilocks “This ones too hot … this ones too cold”. Hopefully I’ll end up in a better place than Goldilocks did while still being able to find my “just right”.

I have decided that professionally I need to further develop, refine, and in some cases re-learn PowerShell. It is the best thing I can do for myself professionally at this point. I finally took the plunge and got on Twitter (@J_lR_d), I’ve never been a big social media type, but I hear a lot of good things about the PowerShell Twitterverse so I am going plug in to that and see what shakes out. I’m also going to try and keep this blog going. I don’t know that it will ever have an audience per say but I intend to make it more of my own personal PowerShell “Cloud”, hence the blog name of Start-Transcript. The url itself by the way is PowerShell oriented, if a little bit obscure, in that 3E is ascii hex for > and 5F is the ascii hex for _, hence it is “>_.wordpress.com”. Obscure yes but I thought it was clever.

There is a quote I’ve always enjoyed of Theodore Roosevelt’s

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

It’s time for me to get out of my gray twilight and to dare might things.